Man built an exclusionary pseudo Linux distro instead of going to therapy

I avoid giving stage time to weird people (in the bad sense) here at the Manual. I’m making an exception to link to a July post by DHH, the Danish co-founder of 37Signals (the company behind Basecamp), creator of Omarchy, and author of a blog full of wrong ideas about immigrants and non-white people.

He became the “men do [stupid and/or difficult thing] instead of therapy” meme. I mean, literally. This man built an exclusionary pseudo Linux distro instead of going to therapy. And he’s proud of it! It’s right there on his blog:

Something many people will encounter at some point in their lives. Studies have shown that exercise, for example, is a more effective treatment than talk therapy (and pharmaceuticals!) when dealing with such episodes. But I’m just as interested in the role building competence can have in warding off the demons.

And partly because of this meme.

I’ve talked about it before, but I keep coming back to the fact that it’s exactly backwards. That signing up for an educational quest into Linux, history, or motorcycle repair actually is an incredibly effective alternative to therapy

Congrats on the discovery, DHH, keep it up. Clearly it’s working.

DHH is back in the spotlight after raising USD 12 million from other tech bigwigs for a somewhat shady foundation built around Omarchy, which sparked backlash from employees and customers of the companies involved, like 1Password.

ReKindle 
rekindle.ink

A website full of services to be accessed by Kindle and other tablets with E-Ink screen. Just open the site to notice why. There are even games! (Some services are behind a paying subscription.)

Cool

What’s inside Isabella’s bag?

In this series, readers showcase what they carry in their backpacks on a daily basis. Check out the other backpacks that have been published and submit yours — the this series depends on you.

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Hey everyone! I’m Isabella (@yawlle/Instagram), a mobile Android developer at a bank working fully remote, 28 years old, living in Vitória, Brazil, and a huge fan of this blog! [Editor: Thank you, Isabella!]

I’m a firm believer that having a prepped bag is like heading out on a quest in an open-world game with your inventory close at hand. I don’t get how anyone leaves the house with just a wallet in their back pocket!

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I didn’t set a cookie 
kuber.studio

Despite the persistent nags to accept or decline tracking cookies on websites, the online surveillance industry already has more advanced techniques for monitoring your wanderings across the web. Collectively, this is called “fingerprinting”. This site shows everything a website can extract from you without needing cookies.

Cool

The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media — and my children have never been happier 
theguardian.com

Reading yet another one of the countless articles and opinion pieces from people discovering that it’s good not to spend the whole day glued to their phone, I picked up an ~interesting technique. When Anna Mathur is with her kids and needs to do something on her phone, she “announces” the action:

One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.

I think it applies to adult-only situations too.

The definitive guide to Neubrutalist web design 
neubrutalism.co

Neubrutalism is a digital aesthetic movement that rejects modern polished neutrality in favor of what they call “graphic bluntness”: high-contrast palettes, bold typography, strongly defined shapes, and conspicuous structure — especially outlines and hard shadows.

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Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.

XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.

Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.

Pacific Block, an image and video blocker for Safari, now supports Shortcuts

App

I’ve mentioned the Pacific Block extension for Safari in passing a few times before. It’s a content blocker, but instead of ads and trackers, it blocks images, audio, and video. It’s great for saving data on a limited mobile plan (like a pay-as-you-go carrier plan) and for speeding up web browsing on unstable connections.

Back in November 2025, I suggested a feature to Jeremy, the developer of Pacific Block: integration with the Shortcuts app, to enable automations. It shipped in version 1.8, released on the 15th.

It works! Well, it actually started working four days later, once a fix for automation uses landed in version 1.9.

I built an automation in Shortcuts exactly the way I’d pictured it a year earlier: whenever I disconnect from any Wi-Fi network, turn on both blocks (images and audio/video) in Pacific Block. Connect to a Wi-Fi network and both turn off again.

I still need to tweak it a bit. I was on a flaky wireless network the other day and noticed the automations kept firing constantly, every time iOS dropped the connection and immediately picked it back up. I think adding a couple of minutes of delay between state changes, and/or some conditionals (if… then) should fix that.

Pacific Block is a universal purchase for USD 2.99 on the App Store.

State of the [WordPress] Community 2026 
thewpocc.org

The results are out from the independent survey on the WordPress community, conducted by the WP Open Community collective.

It represents a scathing critique of WordPress’s direction and, especially, of Matt Mullenweg’s leadership. For example, 73.8% said they feel more negative about the project than 24 months ago. When asked about open source software in general, the negative outlook dropped to 23.9%. The biggest source of problems, with 73.3% saying they had experienced or witnessed incidents, relates to governance and leadership.

The use of generative AI in WordPress displeases most respondents, even among those who use AI at work.

In his closing remarks at WordCamp US on Wednesday (19th), Mullenweg brought up this survey finding and suggested that “We might just need to rebrand some of what we’re doing [with AI]” such as “automation,” according to the account from the blog The Repository. It strikes me that this reaction adds to the evidence of a leadership that doesn’t listen to the community.

The Rebrand Registry 
msrebrandregistry.com

A detailed database of Microsoft brands for their cloud solutions: the names, dates and duration of each one, all backed by trusted sources. I don’t think there is another technology company with an identity crisis as acute as Microsoft. Marcos Daniel’s tip.

Cool

Cove 
cove.run

“The calmest way to run local WordPress.” That’s how Cove presents itself. It’s a CLI app that spins up local websites with automatic HTTPS, one-click admin login, and integration with Cloudflare Tunnels. For Linux, macOS and Windows (WSL2).

Mastodon 5.0: Laying the foundation 
blog.joinmastodon.org

The Mastodon team published some mock-ups of the upcoming version 5.0. The ideas all seem good to me, especially the greater distinction of private mentions (renamed “messages”) and the emphasis given to the lists (renamed “custom feeds”).

999 Penguins 
999penguins.com

Your goal in this game is to eliminate 999 penguins by combining three or more of the same color. (I managed to reach 170 penguins left.)

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